The Good Son
by jessepinkmanincident
Summary: Nate Fisher left his family years ago in order to escape the family business of running a funeral home. Now, after his father's death, he realizes that his actions have hurt his siblings. Very contemplative story, not so much plot-based as thought driven.


Nate doesn't know when he started being the bad son.

From what he can remember, he was a decent enough kid. Maybe he ate with his mouth open. Maybe he left toys all over the floor of the funeral home (and inside a casket, once). Maybe he would go up to the poor crying people and ask them questions that only made them sadder, made them cry more. But it wasn't like he was mean or anything. He wasn't even disobedient. Or was he? He can't remember. It's been a long time since he was a kid.

And yet, he can recall David's birth perfectly.

That clean, white hospital room. A bed with buttons that he would press, watching with wide eyes as it reclined or tilted forward – "Why don't the coffins do that, Dad?" The flowers in the room were so different from those in the funeral home. There were little cards tied to them, saying _congratulations_ instead of _we're so sorry for your loss_.

There were blue teddy bears on his mother's lap, bears that he'd reached for, only for his father to lay a firm hand on his bony shoulder. "Not for you, buddy boy."

In the hallways, Nate could hear crying. A different sort. It wasn't the familiar sobbing that made his heart go sore and numb, so that he had to close his eyes, turn away from the open door where he could see all those people drowning in their tears, bury his face in his mother's apron.

This crying was warm and sweet. He wanted to see it. He peered into the hallway, watched fathers push mothers in wheelchairs, the mothers holding their babies, not noticing the little boy in the doorway. He saw nurses carry in pink or blue balloons. Sometimes both.

He heard young, pure, innocent crying. Soft crying. Chubby red cheeks.

But David's birth was not like that.

David was a quiet baby. When he wanted something, he would clutch at his mother's hand with his own tiny fingers. He was stone faced or sleeping. He didn't seem to be a baby, really. He was more adult than Nate, who kept trying to push his mother's wheelchair despite his too short legs, kept pestering his father. "Why isn't he crying like the other babies? Isn't he happy to be born?"

His father had stopped the wheelchair and pulled Nate to the side. "Do I need to give _you_ the bottle?" he hissed, crouching down so that they were at eye level.

Nate stared at him.

"We have to get home. There's a funeral tomorrow, and since your mother will be preoccupied, you'll have to help me with some things."

"But Mom just had a baby."

Nate couldn't even see David behind his mother's hunched back.

"Yeah, well, someone else just lost their father. It's time to take care of them."

And then his father was walking, long skeletal strides – why was he wearing that dark suit? – and his mother was rolling and now, now, David was finally crying, and the wails echoed off of the walls, and Nate decided that he did not want to hear that every day along with the crying of people who'd lost someone.

Standing in the middle of the hallway, shoelaces untied, hair mussed, Nate wished he was going home with a different family. A family that would celebrate life instead of mourn it.

What David had going for him was acceptance.

Nate was curious about his father's work, but he wasn't interested, really. He liked living people, living girls with wavy hair and thin legs and laughter. Living boys who slouched as they walked, who could turn a joke out of anything. When Nate saw a dead body, all he could think of was the life it had lived. The deadness dissatisfied him. That rotten smell. The cold, pale skin. How could anyone look at a corpse and see opportunity? All he saw was opportunity lost.

He didn't think David was interested, either. He read too many law books, knew too much about potential lawsuits. Dad would always go to David when he had a concern. David didn't know much about the bodies, but he was wary of becoming one. He worried about running out of food. Of droughts – "We really should open business outside of California." He regularly hid money and didn't believe in using it except for basic necessities (which, in their world, were coffins, flower arrangements, and other funeral accessories). Which was probably why David was not at college, where he truly wanted to be. Nate knew that. He knew about living people. He saw the yearning in David's eyes whenever he received a college email.

"College doesn't matter," he'd say, shaking his head and deleting it. "We're all going to die eventually anyways. One day I'll be putting those students in the ground."

Tolerance.

Acceptance.

That's all it was.

Meanwhile, Nate had discovered parties, and learned that he was a mediocre dancer, but girls didn't mind because he looked good, anyways. He found that he hated the taste of beer but he liked the effect it had on his mind. He liked coming home to a dark house and feeling lighter and brighter than all the rest of them. Those dead bodies were far, far beneath his feet; he was up in the sky. He might as well have gone to Heaven.

And he liked hiking. He liked dating. He liked lounging around with friends and doing nothing but that.

Sometimes, though, he couldn't help but think how sad it was that David was younger than him and spending his nights with dead bodies.

"Come on, David, you've got to loosen up," he whined, once, trying to pull his brother by the tie. "Keep this up and you'll be the next one in a coffin."

"I doubt it," said David, who could barely stand, he was so tired. He had been looking at a dead body and wishing he could push it off the table so he could lay there instead. "I'm not the one drinking myself to death."

Nate had as much willpower as David had acceptance, and so he was able to drag him to a party that night. David stood in a corner. Nate wanted to sleep with people but didn't want to leave his brother alone, so instead he got them both bottles of beer from the pink-haired bartender, and they drank together, sitting cross-legged on the floor. They kept mixing up each other's bottles. They didn't care. They talked about law and traveling and the kind of people they wanted to be. "I think I would like to drive a motorcycle," said David. "Don't you think that would intimidate my opponents? And I could go anywhere."

Eventually a girl's heeled shoe knocked the bottles over, and the beer spilled, and the brothers watched as the stain spread across the floor.

"It looks like we both peed at the same time," said David, and then he laughed and beer came out of his nose, so Nate helped him to his feet and they staggered out into the chilly night air.

For a moment, they stood on the empty sidewalk, shivering in their thin jackets, and they felt like each other. Their blood was blue and cold, and it was as if they had been X-rayed, or as if someone was looking at them through 3D glasses. Everything was real.

Then Nate said, "If we don't get back soon, Dad's going to be putting us in the coffins."

So they trudged home, slipping on ice, leaning against each other.

When they got back to the funeral home, David threw up over the dead body he was working on. "You okay, man?" asked Nate, cringinig. He tried to wipe the vomit from his brother's chin.

Their father walked in and stared at them. "Forget about him," he said, "and clean up the body."

Nate cleaned the body. David sat, watching, aching.

Claire was neither good nor bad. She was just there. Nate knows that he was never very attentive towards her. Brothers and sisters aren't supposed to get along, after all. He believed he had every reason to avoid her.

But now she is older and she yearns for things, the way he and David always have, and there is no one to talk about things with her. No one to guide. Mom is quiet. Dad is busy burying people, not raising them. He's never even asked Claire for help with the business. She's avoided it more than anyone else.

And yet, maybe that's not quite a good thing.

Maybe she needs to be able to connect with someone. Maybe she needs to spend nights sitting between a cold body and a warm one.

Nate thinks he's done a decent job as David's older brother. But he left before he could do anything for Claire. And it's not like David was ever going to open up to her – David won't even open up to himself.

So it was up to Nate, really, and he thinks it always has been. Even if he knows next to nothing about periods, or the way butterflies are supposed to feel in a girl's stomach, or makeup, or any of that.

Of course, Claire shows no desire for any brotherly support, so maybe he's just overthinking things.

But sometimes he looks at her closed bedroom door, can hear the TV shows behind it, and he wonders how fictional characters are any better than dead people.

Then again, who is he to talk?

He left, after all.

For strangers. For quick fucks. For hearts beating beneath his hands, pulses vibrating against his own, wrists and ribs and necks and skin.

For long, lonely rides and good music (good music is good company, he's always believed).

For Seattle and rain and streetlamps and motorcycles. That one night, pressed to a girl's leather jacket, he thought, wouldn't David like this? Wouldn't he see the neon lights reflecting on the dark street and see something beautiful there?

And wouldn't Claire talk to this girl, and wouldn't they understand each other, even over the loud bike engine?

He had just wanted to get to her apartment.

He'd moved around a lot before Seattle, though. He'd gone out of the country. He'd gone to Italy, France, Germany. He went to a nude beach alone and woke up covered in sand, surrounded by smiling girls with wet hair.

He took part in a protest, held up signs with confusing messages, written in languages strange to him. He only knew that the pretty girls were only wearing their bras or bikini tops with their shorts, and that they smiled at him with all their white teeth when they saw his colorful sign. Probably something to do with the feminist movement, he'd thought. And he'd felt really bad thinking this, knowing that he was probably going against everything they believed in, just marching down the road so he could feel their slim hips bump against his. It was almost worth it despite the cool gazes of the nearby police.

Nate went skiing in Switzerland, and wondered if his siblings had ever learned to ski. In California? Probably not. They didn't even know how to surf. But they could bury bodies. If he died out there in the snow, they'd know what to do with him.

Or they may leave him there. After all, wasn't he practically gone, anyways?

Nate thought a lot while he was gone.

It was years, and it was more than all this. There were beds and cigarettes and losing his way on hiking trips, and sometimes he would look at the girls sprawled on their beds and wonder if he was killing them, if he was planting something bad inside of them, some sort of disease or sickness. If they got pregnant he would not abandon them. If they got STDs, he would bury them.

Or he'd smoke for a while with some new buddies, and when the lights faded out, he smelled ash on their breath, and tasted it on his teeth, and his lungs felt smoky, as if they weren't there. And his mind was somewhere else. He was floating, and for the first time, he would've given anything to be underground.

The hiking trip was just frightening. It was him, alone in the dark, and he thought, _no one will find me_.

He'd never taught David or Claire to do any of that. They'd never been guided. How could they possibly find him in such a large, faraway forest? Not by sheer willpower, at least. They didn't have enough of that, if any. Claire probably didn't even know what he looked like.

Those had been lonely years.

Father dearest is dead, now, and all three of them are seeing him. They are hearing his big band music. They are feeling his black suits swish by them. Growing up in a funeral home, they have never believed in ghosts, but now they are starting to wonder.

"I didn't even say a proper goodbye to him," says Nate one night, as the three of them sit on the front porch, knees drawn to their chests.

It is like they are children again. The sun is setting and their skin looks orange, pink. Nate imagines himself on fire. David wants to escape the heat. Claire wants a tan.

They do not respond to Nate's comment.

He reluctantly turns away from the sun to look at them, and they are looking at him, too. It occurs to him that he never said a proper goodbye to them, either. What if he had died while he was gone? Or if they'd died? What if all they remembered of each other was a humid kitchen, a crying mother, a yelling father, and the sound of a car engine humming outside? A slamming door? Claire cutting her hair a couple of days later and wondering if Nate would ever see (he didn't, except in pictures). David losing himself in the work, sitting over dead bodies, falling asleep over dead bodies, nearly dying over dead bodies (he'd forgotten to feed himself one week, blaming it on the fact that dead bodies did not require food or drink, and that was all he could pay attention to at the time).

And then sex with boys for both of them. Boys with drugs. Boys with hugs.

Dead bodies.

Dead bodies everywhere.

God, the house might as well have been rotting away over the years. It would have if it had just been the Fisher family. But they had to keep it alive for the dead.

Now that their father is dead, does it even matter anymore? Nate wonders if it ever did. Nathaniel loved his family, he doesn't doubt that, but Nathaniel also loved other families, and resting his hands on their sad slumped shoulders, and murmuring condolences. He loved dead families, all buried in the same plot together with matching headstones and rhyming phrases.

"They remind you that life is short," he'd said once. "You've got to live to the fullest, be with people you really care about."

What the hell did he know about it?

Nate looks at his hunched over siblings. Claire is small and low. She's pulled her hair back so she can feel the sun on her shoulders, and she is humming a Glen Miller tune, one of their father's favorites. He wonders what she is thinking about. Probably leaving this place, just the way he did. No job. No college. Just moving and not stopping.

And there is David, stiff as ever. He is still wearing a suit and tie. He is always wearing a suit and tie, it seems. As if he's waiting for a dead body to appear on the doorstep, along with a great big pile of cash. David will be ready. He is desperate to keep people around, to keep the place busy and full of life (and, well, death).

They should not be thinking like this.

Claire should be eager, excited. She should be smiling. She should not be able to stop talking about her future and what she wants to do with her life.

David should be a lawyer, helping people improve their lives, earning enough money to keep them all going for years. He should have someone who makes him happy, who encourages him to live his life, not other people's deaths..

Nate closes his eyes.

He was a good son, he thinks. He did exactly what his father did. He ignored his family and made them survive without him. Equivalent to death, really, because how could they survive without the happiest person in the house? The only person who truly saw the dead people for the people they once were?

This family is rotting.

He reaches out, touches both of his siblings on the shoulders. They face him again. He smiles. "We'll figure this out," he says. "Together."

It's time to be a good brother.


End file.
